The major note here is that the current draft HTML 5 spec has the SQL API as an asynchronous one, whereas Gears has a synchronous API. In my experience, people prefer synchronous here, and Adobe AIR has a new synchronous API that they just released with the latest beta. I would love to see the HTML 5 spec contain a synchronous version too.

Man. This is so weird. Who’d of thought HTML would have storage support with a SQL API. Now not only do we have to worry about separating form, from presentation, from behavior, but also a whole new model.